This paper is primarily concerned with accountability and acknowledgement, and
their relationship to one another, in Antjie Krog's <i>Country of My Skull&lt;/i&gt; (1998). Arguing
that both accountability and acknowledgement become ethically problematic in
Krog's transposition of one form of textual practice to another (for example, her
transposing of testimony and of academic non-fictional texts into fictional narrative or
poetry), the paper proposes that two very different ethical problems arise in <i>Country
of My Skull&lt;/i&gt; because of an elision of textual and generic frames that ultimately erases
traces to textual "origins": whether that origin be the testimonies given at the Truth
and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings, or other textual materials used by
Krog in the making of this text. The ethical consequence of this muddying of genres
and textual frames is twofold: first, the appropriation of individual testimonial voices
and, second, plagiarism - two very different ethical transgressions which,
nevertheless, bear consideration alongside one another since the two may be seen
to emerge from the same textual practice as Krog's; what she refers to as "quilting".
While Krog sees textual quilting as allowing for a multivocal text that does not
present a singular or coherent notion of national truth, I will argue that it also allows
Krog to transpose one form of textuality into a different generic frame altogether.
While this is not in and of itself problematic, the ethical consequences of the
transposition, reinterpretation, and transformation of one textual object to another
require careful consideration. The paper ultimately suggests that fictional and poetic
texts need to acknowledge and be accountable to the original texts that they
transpose and transform by providing the reader with a clear and interpretable traceback
to that original.